The latest instalment in the Bruce Grobbelaar match-fixing saga deftly illustrates the proverb "rules are meant to be broken". Not only has football seen one of its heroes accused of low-level rule breaking - deliberately letting in goals to swing matches for money - but the real effect of this case may be to force the tabloid press into breaking a few rules of its own. The case concluded last week with no clear winner eight years after the Sun first published the match-fixing allegations against Grobbelaar in 1994. The Sun was found to have libelled Grobbelaar by the original trial jury who did not believe its defence that the story was true, only for the jury's decision to be set aside by the court of appeal on the basis it was "perverse".

Last week, the House of Lords reinstated the jury's decision, while also finding Grobbelaar to be corrupt and dishonest and consequently reducing the initial £85,000 damages to a nominal £1.

While both sides have been busy claiming a victory, the worrying implications of this decision for tabloid journalism have been overlooked. When the Sun first published its exposé of Grobbelaar it must have believed it was on safe ground. With copies of videotapes, no less, in the hands of the Sun showing Grobbelaar effectively admitting to fixing games, the paper must have felt confident of proving that the allegations were true.

And by the time the libel action had reached the courts, the Sun had further reason to feel secure in light of the case of Albert Reynolds vs the Sunday Times which established that a newspaper has a defence (known as qualified privilege) to a libel action, even if the allegations complained of are held to be false, if it can show it had good reason to publish them and did so responsibly.

Bearing in mind the apparent strength of its evidence, the Sun looked sure to succeed, if not by proving the allegations true, then surely due to the protection of a qualified privilege defence. And so it came as something of a surprise when not only did the jury disregard the video evidence and find in Grobbelaar's favour, awarding him £85,000, but the judge rejected the qualified privilege defence.

The Sun took the case to the court of appeal which, while extraordinarily ousting and replacing the jury's verdict on whether the allegations were true, also rejected the qualified privilege defence. Its reasons for doing so are concerning. Although the court could find little fault with the Sun's actions - the story was undeniably a newsworthy event of high public interest and there was clear recorded evidence of the claimant setting out his side of the story - it appeared to reject the qualified privilege defence due to the manner in which the story had been presented. The court's criticism of the Sun focused on its "massive and relentless coverage of the story", its use of "prominent headlines" and language that was "in the highest degree emotive". In short, it was penalised by the court for being a tabloid newspaper.

Although the case was taken to the house of lords, the Sun did not appeal against the decision on qualified privilege and so the court of appeal decision, so adverse to tabloid newspapers, remains as binding authority.

Unfortunately, this is not an isolated example. Similar attitudes to the tabloid press were indicated in the Jamie Theakston privacy case last year. The judge there reached the conclusion that the information Theakston was trying to protect, namely that he had visited a brothel, was not confidential only to go on to rule that although the story could therefore be published in words, the same information depicted by photographs could not.

A more recent case saw Panorama applying to the court to allow it to use confidential documents obtained from the Jockey Club with a view to broadcasting an exposé of the racing world. A factor there that appears to have tipped the balance in Panorama's favour is that the court was convinced by the BBC's responsible intentions and the fact that it could not be said Panorama was anything other than "a serious current affairs television programme". A tabloid newspaper would almost certainly have fared less well if it had been brought before the court to be judged on such criteria.

In a less high-profile case last year, we also saw a police clerk permitted to bring a claim against the Sun for harassment in respect of the newspaper's reporting. This concerning development is highly unlikely to be exercised against a broadsheet paper where the manner and tone of investigative journalism is on the whole deemed more palatable to judges than that employed by the Sun.

It may be true that in the privacy case brought by the footballer Garry Flitcroft earlier this year against the Sunday People Lord Woolf made a passionate case for freedom of expression to be upheld in all its forms, including tabloid journalism. But such sentiments from the judiciary are rare.

Increasingly, it would seem, it now matters not what we say but how and perhaps more importantly where we say it, with the courts adopting the highly undesirable policy of upholding freedom of expression merely for those who promise only to write nicely.